Piano music I like while reading counterterrorism books

... while re-reading (blue pen, red pen, yellow highlighter, and post-it plastic tabs) Jack Goldsmith's utterly engaging The Terrorism Presidency and Judge Richard A. Posner's sober and sobering Countering Terrorism:

Domenico Scarlatti, Keyboard Sonatas, 1685-1757 (Mikhail Pletnev, piano). Like a broken string of pearls scattering across a polished floor, as I seem to remember one Scarlatti contemporary describing them.

Handel, Suites for Keyboard (Keith Jarrett, piano). This is by far my favorite album of piano music, ever, I think. Partly it is the music - I have the Ur-text editions and often play along with the bass line on my cello, to the household's great unhappiness. But it is also Keith Jarrett's delicate, moving without ever getting schmaltzy, reading of the pieces. I've listened to the CD hundreds of times.

Listening to Rufus Cappadocia, jazz cellist

I discovered Rufus Cappadocia, a Canadian born jazz cellist, a while back cruising through YouTube videos on electric and jazz cello. His techniques, range from percussive strumming and plucking to melody lines taken from the Middle East and elsewhere, extend the range of what the cello means very considerably. I'm listening now to Transformation, off his solo cello album, and it is extraordinary - you would have no idea you were listening to a cello. It sounds like he is strumming a bass guitar of some kind combined with some kind of drum. He plays a self designed five string electric cello, with an extra bottom string on the low F. The instrument is electric but, as he says, the electronics are passive in order not to lose the overtones lost by other electric cellos (including presumably my Yamaha). I also rather liked this YouTube video of him with vocalist Bethany - he plays entirely by plucking, making his cello into a percussive, driving instrument. Here on youtube. I don't know much about acoustic jazz upright bass, but watching him play, it looks an awful lot like he's studied how upright bass is played, how the right hand is used, very loose, almost slapping the strings.

If I had four daughters and were naming them ...

This exceedingly goofy thought arose out of listening to my daughter and her friend talk about where their names came from (grandmothers in each case). Well. If I had four daughters - and this is assuming that my wife had no say in the matter, meaning this is alternative universes, possible worlds stuff - I would name them:

Sarabande (Sara)
Chaconne (Chaca?)
Allemande (Allie)
Giga (Gigi)

Daughter and friend told me this was one of the worst child-naming schemes anyone on the whole planet had ever dreamed up. Quite possibly so. I'm going to take a break and practice the cello. It is almost 8:00 pm and still feels like a steambath outside in DC today. I couldn't even get myself to go to the gym, which was not good at all. Then I'll suggest to the girls and my wife that we watch something sort of scary ... the 1950s version of ... Village of the Damned.

(Update. Renee added later on ... and if you had a fifth girl, you'd probably want to name her ... Tarantella (Tara). Hmm ...)

Boulevard of Broken Dreams is locked in my head

... and it is driving Jean-Marie and Renee crazy, because I am (apparently) humming it absently mindedly continuously, including (apparently) during Mass today. I don't even like the film Moulin Rouge, old version or new. It is the Marianne Faithfull version that caught me - hadn't heard it since the 1980s - this is why iTunes is dangerous. It plays awfully nicely on cello, in any of three octaves - d minor, sliding, sliding, sliding all the way up to a very high A on the A string. I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff on cello or violin. Two or three cellos would be very, very cool with this. Okay, I wonder if I can make a trade with Renee ... she plays this on her cello with me, and I offer to play the bass line of her Buffy the Vampire Slayer The Musical, Once More With Feeling? Hmm.

Urban hiking in DC on a warm Saturday

I was suddenly seized with a desire not to go to the gym today, and so I decided to do an "urban hike" - a walk around DC. In today's heat, I definitely sweat a lot, but I can't say it's really aerobic exercise. Maybe 5-6 miles, total loop, but I don't walk fast enough to do the powerwalking aerobic thing. Still, I felt like being outside even though it is summer in DC, which is to say, horrible. Why can't I be in California, preferably the Eastern Sierra Nevada? Jean-Marie and Renee were at Renee's swim meet at St Alban's - they are out the door pretty much every Saturday by 6:30 am, which is a precise and accurate explanation of why I gave up on attending swim meets. So I hiked from our house at American University down to Dupont Circle, then cut over on M Street and recrossed Rock Creek Park into Georgetown. I'm currently sitting and posting from Saxby's coffee house next to Georgetown University. I like the place - student place, friendly, airconditioned, free wifi - I used to come here Sunday mornings while Renee was in religion class at the church up the block. Listening to my ipod - I broke with all the Marianne Faithfull oldies I had been just slightly obsessed with (Renee asked me What On Earth I Had Been Humming For Three Days Straight?!? - Ans: Faithfull's cover of the 1930s Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I finally got it out of my head by playing the melody on my cello - it works well in D minor in either of two octaves. It would sound good with two cellos, one on the melody and one on an arpeggiated background, or two cellos with a vocalist singing in Faithfull's "nicotine-stained" contralto.) So: not Marianne Faithfull, but Antonio Caldara's trio sonatas and cello sonatas, from the 17th century Italian Baroque.

La Marseillaise is stuck in my head!

After listening to the YouTube video of the crowd singing La Marseillaise in Paris at the celebration of Sarkozy's victory, it is now stuck in my head. I have been humming it all day long. I even played it on my cello when I should have been playing Buxtehude. What to do?! I listened to the San Francisco acid rock album by the Jefferson Starship, Blows Against the Empire at the gym, but even the Jerry Garcia lead, sample here on Starship, was no match for La Marseillaise.

(Per request of commenter, I've linked above to one of the several YouTube videos.)

The Singing Professor, or, To the Barricades!

A play in indefinite acts.

Scene: Dinner, lovely DC spring evening, family - Jean-Marie, Ken, Renee, Uncle Jack - eating on the screened in porch. Twilight. All is peaceful with the world.

Jean-Marie (brightly): The salmon is great.

Ken: humming distractedly

Jean-Marie: Renee got a 97% on her earth science test.

Ken: humming distractedly

Jean-Marie: She did okay on the math test.

Ken: humming distractedly

Jean-Marie: But she got a C on the passive voice Latin test

Ken: humming distractedly

Jean-Marie: And she'll probably be thrown out of school.

Ken: humming distractedly

Jean-Marie: Tuition just went up to $250,000 a year. No senior got into college. And Renee's 8th grade ethics class has been mobilized as part of the National Guard and is being sent to do community service in Ira - will you stop humming that damn song! This isn't Casablanca!

Curtain, followed by terrible commotion off-stage. Unclear whether Act II will be played. Stay tuned.

***
The salmon is a variant of a recipe seen on the Rachel Ray show on the food channel, featuring salmon baked in a mixture of half cup rum, a tablespoon or so of mayonnaise, lemon juice, balsamic vinegar splash, splash of molassas, a couple of tablespoons of yellow Thai curry sauce, much garlic and much ginger, both best fresh. Cover salmon with sauce top and bottom. Very hot oven - 425 degrees F, about twenty minutes for a pound of salmon. It's Rachel Ray - which is to say, Not Low Cal.

The great Rostropovich, farewell

(See the outstanding review essay by GS Smith in the May 11, 2007 Times Literary Supplement, "Playing With Fire," reviewing Elizabeth Wilson, Mstislav Rostropovich: Cellist, teacher, legend (Faber 2007). Not online anywhere, but should eventually appear in the subscriber only TLS archive.)

John Marchese on modern luthiers in the NYT

The New York Times of Saturday, April 7, 2007, has a piece on the op-ed page by John Marchese, author of the newly appearing The Violin Maker: Finding a Centuries Old Tradition in a Brooklyn Workshop, all about comparing Strads to modern violins. I am not in a position to judge, well, anything about whether a Strad violin or cello can be heard to differ from a modern instrument. I just wouldn't have the ear or expertise.

I can say, though, based on the experience of shopping a couple of times through instruments out of my price range in cellos, that if I wanted to radically improve my cello playing, the easiest way to do it would be to ... purchase a much more expensive instrument. It seems very likely to me that at the top range of instruments, the quality is as good as the ancient workshops of Cremona. But the difference between what I sound like on my $10,000 high school student cello (Cremona 1988) and a $100,000 instrument, old or new, is pretty striking. I can hear it when I play and when I hear it played back recorded. Ooh. Cello lust and envy.

There is, by the way, a great little book - a lovely belles-lettres essay - The Countess of Stanlein Restored, by Nicholas Delbanco, describing the restoration of a Strad cello by a modern luthier.

I have not been playing my cello very much at all these days - I've been on the road so much, it's been difficult. I want to get back to it, and will as soon as I get back from the last road trip for a while, Thursday to Monday this upcoming week for a board meeting of MDLF in New York City. I'm distressed though that I will miss my daughter Renee playing in her conservatory recital next weekend - she doesn't get a chance to play very often in recital, although the conservatory has them monthly, on account of her homework schedule - she will be playing the prelude from the second Bach cello suite. She is getting a very lovely, sure tone out of it - not too fast, and getting a sense of the cadence. And without me saying a word - we're way past the point where Daddy is allowed to play cello coach.

Downloading Mark O'Connor's Appalachia Waltz

Very cool - I have been curious for some years to see the written music for fiddler Mark O'Connor's lovely Appalachia Waltz - the piece that he, Yo Yo Ma, and Edgar Meyer performed so successfully back in their bluegrass interlude in the 1990s. You can listen to a snippet of Yo Yo Ma performing it as a solo piece, here. So I went to Mark O'Connor's homepage and purchased the score, downloadable as a pdf file, for $4.00. I got the solo cello version - the one Yo-Yo Ma plays as an encore frequently at concerts. It is filled with a dismaying number of double stops, runs fairly high, and I'm not sure if I'm really up to tackling it. Nonetheless, I am pleased to have the score.

(PS. I have been listening to the trio version O'Connor has recorded for fiddle, viola, and cello, snippet here, and I like it a lot. It is quite playable for intermediate players in all instruments. Funny, I admit I have rarely paid much attention to viola - I tend to dismiss it as the thing between the violin and the cello - but in this recording, the viola carries a lot of the weight of the piece, and I found myself very much in love with the timbre of the viola. It is also available in sheet music downloadable at O'Connor's homepage.)

On matters entirely unrelated to the topic of this blog ...

First, thank goodness for the early reappearance of daylight savings time. I go crazy in the early darkness all about.

Second, I haven't been practicing my cello very much at all in the last six months. Nonetheless, I am gradually reaching the end of Bach's flute partita in A minor, BWV No. 1013, transcribed for cello in D minor - lovely piece - I don't play it very well, but I think it is time to move on. Question is, move on to what? I would like to play the Vivaldi two cello concerto thing in Renee's Suzuki book - nice piece - but alas, the kid is not wild about playing with Daddy. My view, for what's it's worth, is what was the point of raising her with music lessons if she won't play music with me? On the electric cello frontier, I still need to finish transcribing Santana's La samba pa ti, so I can finish learning it. But what new in the classical field?

Third, after thinking it over carefully, I've decided that if I could play any instrument really well - apart from the cello, that is - it would be the pedal steel guitar. I don't think any instrument comes quite as close to the lyricism and timbre of the human voice. My impression talking with musicians is that it is a very difficult instrument to play well. But I sure do love it.

Fourth, said daughter has a big decision to make, whether to leave her current school, NCS, and go over to Sidwell, where she was just accepted. Tempted as I am to just tell her she's going and that's that - she's only fourteen and in 8th grade, for heaven's sake, and my wife and I know to our bones that she would be fantastically happier and at least as well educated - we've told her it's her decision. I'm holding my breath and hoping she does it.

Fifth, next week is my spring break week. It is a law of nature that my spring break never coincides with my wife and daughter's. So next week is a big writing week for me - I have to get the short UN book ms. redo heavily underway and revise the short Fordham piece and write the long pending stuff for the TLS and also make sure I'm prepared with my upcoming talks at Bard College and Wayne State University Law School. At the same time, I have important administrative stuff to do at school - turn in a proposal to start up a mini program on nonprofit law at my law school - and with the Media Development Loan Fund, getting ready for the April board meeting in New York.

Sixth, after I get back from break, I want to get my research assistants geared up to help me revise my course materials for my basic classes. I've decided I need to shift the focus in my corporate finance class - less emphasis on stuff that was covered in business associations, such as equity, and much more focus on bonds and debentures, as well as much more focus on derivatives. I don't plan to introduce any real quantitative stuff into the course - I used to do that, years ago, made the class all buy a particular calculator, did present value, etc., but with 90 students in very different "math places," it was a disaster year after year. The students who already knew it were bored and wrote notes in student evaluations about how much of their tuition dollars you wasted, and the ones who didn't didn't manage to learn it and wrote notes about the inverse. You need a four or five day a week class with small sections and homework each day, not a law school class. My colleague at WCL, Jonathan Baker, has started teaching a quantitative methods class that covers both litigation issues such as statistical use of evidence and basic finance stuff, and I push students over to him - the class is new but my students love it. But I do think you can study derivatives from a legal/finance standpoint as precisely what they are (and the folks at Long Term Capital forgot) - contracts. You can still do a lot with derivatives just dealing with forwards/futures, options, swaps, and securitization, just looking at their contractual characteristics and their marketplace uses. So I want to rework some of that material, also add more explanatory material to my IBT class, which mostly consists of basic contractual transactions.

Cello, a Korean horror movie

Further to my post about cello music, you might check out the following trash-horror flick on DVD from Korea, Cello:

Tartan Films is set to release their next Asia Extreme DVD, Cello, on July 25th - so today they posted the trailer for the film on iFilm for you guys to check out. Read on for details on this year's Comic Con and Tartans involvment. Mi-ju, played by the beautiful Sung Hyun-Ah, is a brilliant cellist who craves peace and stability after surviving a car crash, which killed her best friend. Haunted by terrifying memories of the accident, she decides to forgo a professional career in music, in favor of teaching college students and her daughter how to play. Unfortunately, things begin to go terribly wrong. One of her students attacks her, her sister in-law becomes dangerously obsessed with her fiancée, and the new housekeeper is scaring her to death. Further, there is something very ominous and portentous about the music coming out of her daughter’s cello.

And a fabulous score of nearly all cello music ... how can you go wrong?

Electric cello with wah wah pedal

When I was out at the Anderson family reunion at my brother's place in St. Louis, I was surprised by a late birthday present from my two brothers, Richard and John - a digitech modeling guitar processor pedal to use with my electric cello and amp. So, electric cello plugged into pedal plugged into amp, gain up - and I really can sound like a screaming lead electric guitar. Much to the annoyance of wife and daughter.

What I don't have is any kind of recording capability - my "little" brother John (actually 35 years old and a tax attorney with Debevoise in London), guitarist, has a whole setup for both synthesizing all sorts of other tracks and then recording everything.

I have been working on learning for electric cello Carlos Santana's late 1960s La Samba Pa Ti. Hal Leonard puts out a great music book with note by every last note transcriptions of each part for certain albums, including some Santana. It is hard. You have to realize I am actually a very bad amateur cellist - passionate, but not very good.